"Death in Paradise" - читать интересную книгу автора (Parker Robert B.)

Chapter Eleven

They had lost 8 to 5. The field lights had been turned off and they were in the parking lot drinking beer in the semidarkness.

"I was a month out of high school," Jesse said. "And we were playing in Danville."

It was Jesse's turn to buy the beer. It was in a green plastic cooler, buried in ice, in the back of Jesse's Explorer. The rear door of the Explorer was up. Jesse's glove was in the back of the truck, too, and the bases, and a green canvas bag with bat handles sticking out.

"Had a third baseman, an old guy, twenty-eight probably, ancient to be playing at that level. He was a career minor leaguer, and knew it, and played I think because he sort of didn't know what else to do."

The winning team was across the parking lot gathered around their beer cooler like hunters at a campfire. There was no hostility, but there wasn't much interchange. After a game you clustered with your team.

"Anyway, in the first inning there's two outs, nobody on and their three hitter pops up a goddamned rainmaker to the left side. We were playing in a damn cow pasture and the lights were set too low and the sucker went up out of sight."

The smell of the lake was with them in the slow-deepening purple of the evening, and a few early explorers had arrived in advance of the inevitable insect swarm that would, as it always did, eventually force them to give it up and go back to the ordinary light of their homes.

"I'm looking up trying to find it when it comes back into the light, and the third baseman says, 'You got it, kid.' And everybody trots off the field while I'm weaving around out there looking for the ball."

Everyone listened to Jesse quietly. They were men to whom such stories mattered. Men who would know why the story was funny. Men who could imagine the scared kid alone in the middle of the diamond looking up into the night for his first professional pop-up.

"You catch it?" someone said.

The younger guys listened most closely. Kids who would fall asleep in class, listening to Jesse talk about life in the minors, as if he were Socrates.

"Barely," Jesse said.

Everyone laughed. They were happy with the story. They all knew that the better you were, the more you talked about your failures. Jesse was clearly the best player in the league, maybe good enough to have played in the majors if he hadn't got hurt.

"You win the game?" someone asked.

"Don't know. But I went two for four."

Everyone laughed again. Jesse had been there. They could laugh with him at the pretense that players cared only about winning. You played ball, you knew better.

Jesse finished his beer. One more wouldn't hurt. It was Lite beer anyway. You could drink a lot of Lite beer before you got drunk enough to show it. He plunged his hand into the ice-filled cooler and rummaged out another can. It had a round solid feel to it, cold in his hand.

"You have a lot of groupies in the minors, Jess?"

"Not enough," Jesse said.

"When I was playing football," someone said, "we'd go into some town for an away game, they'd be waiting outside the visitors' locker room."

"You score?"

"During the game or after?"

They all laughed.

"After."

"A lot more than during," the football player said.

"What about AIDS?"

"It was before AIDS," the football player said.

It was dark now. The kind of thick summer darkness that feels soft. Oddly the bugs hadn't found them yet in thick enough quantity to drive them home.

"I remember playing hockey in Helsinki," somebody said. "Outdoor rink. Was so fucking cold the puck froze. One of our guys tees up a big slap shot from the blue line and the goddamned puck shatters."

People began to drift home. To wives. And children. And late suppers. And living rooms lit by the glow of a large-screen television.

"You find out who killed that girl yet, Jesse?"

"Not yet," Jesse said. "But I went three for three tonight."